(Independent Leader) Church leaders do not own marriage

Given that the Government’s plans to legalise gay marriage have been strongly and very publicly opposed by leading members of the Church of England ”“ including a former Archbishop of Canterbury and the current Archbishop of York ”“ it would have been unrealistic to expect anything like a welcome from the generally more conservative hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Even so, the ferocity of the language used in a newspaper article…[last weekend] by Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of the church in Scotland and the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in Britain, almost takes the breath away.

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3 comments on “(Independent Leader) Church leaders do not own marriage

  1. driver8 says:

    I’m a bit lost. Can anyone find an argument in this Independent piece?

  2. Daniel Muth says:

    #1 I concur. It looks like the article ended just as it was getting started. Nevertheless, I think we see herein the basic divide in place [i]before[/i] one side could even contemplate same-sex “marriage” – that between those who understand marriage as an objective given defined by God and grounded in nature (i.e. incarnational because transcendent) and those who assume it to be an arbitrary creature of the all-consuming state, which is free to redefine the term upon any whim of a 50.001% majority. That the latter group hasn’t the foggiest idea what the former is talking about should surprise no one. We’re bound to see a lot more of this sort of cluelessness, though hopefully not much of it this inartfully expressed.

  3. driver8 says:

    I think that’s, more or less, right. The Independent just declines to engage in ethical reflection: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/03/4607